Hard Boiled Wonderland

About

Overpopulation. Climate change. Resource shortages. Terrorism. War. There is no doubt that we live in troubled times. One only need scratch the surface to witness anger, intolerance, exploitation and deprivation. For most people denial, wilful blindness or self-induced oblivion provide a coping mechanism, but this exhibition presents three artists for whom the only way to deal with the hard-core of our reality is to paint.

Although stylistically and temperamentally varied, each artist draws heavily from the Surrealist canon. They paint emotionally not logically. Like the great literary and filmic works that inspire them, they create parallel universes inhabited by peculiar characters, staple props and recurring motifs. This is dystopia, a warped reflection or surreal parody of our world; a place of extremes; not sanitised but dirty, tough, dangerous, and sinister. Porn fairy tales or slash cartoons. The artists’ embrace of everything base and primitive lends the work an initially comic air but the gallows humour belies a deeply serious message. These paintings show us, in no uncertain terms, the madness and the darkness of our internal and external worlds, and it is through understanding such fictions that we come to comprehend the truth of our reality.

Schedule